Google Calendar adds Gears support, now available offline

In late January, Google began offering Gears support for your GMail account and now Google Calendar has received offline superpowers as well. Right now the feature is really only handy for getting a look at what’s on your schedule: it’s read-only, so you can’t edit or add events for synchronization later. Since GMail already provides a more complete set of offline features, hopefully we’ll see increased functionality in Calendar in the near future.

If you’re not using a desktop calendar application with CalDav to do this already, it’s a nice reassurance to know that your Calendar data is accessible right in your browser even if you’re temporarily without an internet connection.

If you haven’t installed the Gears plugin for your browser yet, you’ll need to do that, of course. Get it from Google, then flip the switch on your Calendar. Alex at Google OS noted an error message regarding events beyond June 4, 2009, though my calendar imported without issues. Of course, the feature – and Google Calendar itself, for that matter – is still in beta, so bugfixes and enhancements are no doubt already in the works.